1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to automated web site creation, and more particularly, to a web site builder capable of creating web sites for users who have no web development skills.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently, there are a number of conventional methods that relate to website building. The latest breed of website builders is Wix, Yola and WebsPlanet. Wix and Yola are more successful than other site builders due to ease of “getting on board”. These site builders provide for attractive-looking sites created in minutes that satisfy many owner's needs. The above site builders use a pre-created content for specific types of sites. The pre-created content is sufficient for professional designers to create low-cost client sites.
Wix and Yola deal well with search engine features. The site builders can be used in conjunction with other services, such as blogs (WordPress), marketplaces (Etsy, Craigslist and eBay) or social networks (Facebook/MySpace). The site builders provide for an unobtrusive up-sell of premium features.
However, while using Wix and Yola, one still needs to have a good taste and some basic understanding of good design principles. Otherwise, the created site falls into one of the two categories:
a cookie-cutter site—based on a standard template with very little edits;
a “messed up” site—overdone by too many features and widgets, unmatched colors, etc.
It is not surprising that both Wix and Yola cultivate communities of people, who can design a site for another user. To keep paying customers and up-sell them successfully, a straight-from-template site built by an absolute “newbie” should work and make sense for the owner to keep. For the majority of users, that means that the site must be discoverable and visible in search engines.
Typically, Flash-based sites have problems with search engine optimizations (SEO), but Wix addresses that problem by putting all text content into special one-page HTML version that the search engine bot analyzes. It tries hard to overcome technology limitation, but this approach is not completely bug-free, sometimes “lorem ipsum” text from templates gets mixed, and other bugs have been found as well.
Both solutions can generate sitemap, keywords and descriptions automatically. One can also edit them manually, but even default settings are acceptable. One can monitor and improve site performance by using Wix/Yola tools or easily connect to Google Webmaster/Site Analytics and other solutions.
Special attention is required in case of upgrading free site to its own domain—if Google will see both sites (sub-domain version remains available), then it might wrongly believe that sub-domain version is the original and direct traffic there. The solution is to use a rel-canonical tag to direct traffic to the right version, as Wix does.
However, the way the Wix site is built, there is no way to reference content other than on the home page (i.e., it has no deep links). In addition, while Google has limited support for flash content indexing, it does not work when flash is loaded from JavaScript, like Wix does, so whatever enhancements Google might do with regard to flash content indexing will not do any good for Wix users. Of course, current flash situation makes these enhancements unlikely.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an effective and efficient method for site building that does not require developer or designer input and that overcomes the deficiencies of the existing site builders.